Stephen F. Diamond

Associate Professor of Law

Professor Stephen Diamond joined the faculty after five years as an associate at Latham & Watkins in New York and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto. He teaches courses on business law, securities law, corporate finance, corporate governance, labor issues and the global economy.

He has been a visiting professor at Cornell Law School and a visiting researcher at Harvard, Stanford and U.C. San Diego. He was the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in International Peace and Security. He is a regular guest lecturer at Santa Clara’s Leavey School of Business.

Professor Diamond’s research focuses on capitalist institutions with a particular interest in capital and labor markets. Trained as both a lawyer and a political scientist, he relies on comparative and institutional analysis to assess the impact of globalization, new technology and financial innovation. He is particularly interested in the development of new forms of governance and regulation in the wake of the end of the Cold War.

Professor Diamond has been engaged in a long-term study with Jennifer Kuan of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research on the changing microstructure of the U.S. stock market. He is also working on a new project called “Insider Capitalism” which analyzes innovative financial structures in the high technology sector.

He was co-editor with Lance Compa of Cornell University of Human Rights, Labor Rights and International Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press), the leading text in that subject area.His most recent book is Rights and Revolution: The Rise and Fall of Nicaragua’s Sandinista Movement (Vandeplas).

While in law school Professor Diamond was part of the legal team headed by Professor Harold Koh that represented the so-called Haitian “boat people” who were quarantined by the U.S. government at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay.

While an associate at Latham & Watkins in New York he was part of the legal team that assisted the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund and survivors of the Golden Venture, a ship carrying political refugees from mainland China that ran aground in New York, in the three-year effort that secured the survivors’ release from detention in INS jails.